Thursday, September 22, 2011

The One with the Meal Planning

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

I've found that if I'm going to be successful with losing weight, I HAVE to know ahead of time what I'm going to eat. If I just wait to see "what I feel like", obviously I'm going to feel like pulling the mocha fudge brownies out of the freezer and eat them all for breakfast (and lunch and dinner).

Several years ago I started planning everything I ate, from breakfast all the way up through what snack I was going to eat while watching The Biggest Loser. It helped a lot when I wanted something but didn't know what I wanted. I just looked at my meal plan. This is the sheet I made up to plan with:

I write the date in (this could work as a dry erase, but I print a fresh one every week.) and the points plus values I'm alloted for the day. As I write in a food, I put the ppv beside it. I always start with dinner. I like to cook a nice meal for my family and I want to be able to enjoy it with them so I always make sure I'm going to have enough ppv remaining for the day to enjoy a nice meal. One day next week I'm having manicotti. It's 12 ppv for 2 manicotti, plus I plan to have one piece of garlic bread for 4 ppv and a salad. Since the meal itself is so big, I'll be careful on the toppings on the salad and keep the ppv low. However, I won't determine the amount of ppv I'll use on the salad until I've planned the rest of the day. Whew...this is a lot of words!

On days I have a high ppv dinner planned, I'll take it easy for breakfast and lunch. Maybe a salad, maybe just a big bowl of fruit for breakfast (0 ppv for those!!) I just have to make it work. If I don't have a plan, I'll binge and eat off of the girls' plates and we all know that's not good!

Well, I'm off to work out my meal plan for next week. When it's done I'll post it, maybe I'll give you some inspiration...I know I'm always looking for new meal ideas!!